


Chiaroscuro

by TheSpookyIntrovert



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Cancer Arc (X-Files), Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Kissing, Post-Episode: s05e01-02 Redux, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29042460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpookyIntrovert/pseuds/TheSpookyIntrovert
Summary: "The door clicks open and she has the faint sense of watching her heart walk back into the room. She knows it’s Mulder, knows it because he’s her very own insomniac, but knows it instinctively because restless spirits always come when summoned."
Relationships: Fox Mulder & Dana Scully, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	Chiaroscuro

Scully has felt herself wrapped in the silence of death for a long time. Now, hands languidly caressing the sheets she’d come to think of as her shroud, the notes of silence seem to play a tune of expectation. Life, it whispers. It’ll be a while before she can truly begin to see it as anything more than the absence of death.

It is a night for vigils, she muses, comfortable in the loud stillness of a hospital during the graveyard shift. She can still faintly hear the echoes of song coming from the room next to hers. The haunting contralto of a middle aged woman seeps through the cracks into the pensive darkness, and with it the voice of heaven.

_Oft have we met in gladness,  
And we shall meet again,  
All sorrow left behind us,  
Good night, till then…_

In a few days, no melody will overpower the theme of sorrow playing on the other side of the wall — in death silence reigns supreme. And yet, Scully thinks, eyes traveling over the empty room, sometimes life is the same. She never would have expected the lingering melancholy that comes from brushing hands with death and being again admitted into the embrace of the living. She feels translucent, still, not yet resettled into the vessel of her own body. The future spreads out ahead, crepuscular and still unmade, hastily rewriting pages torn off by cancer. This hospital room is limbo, a place between two worlds where the physical enters to attend its own funeral.

Limbo is where her lips receive the wine of the Extreme Unction and she tastes blood running down her throat. Limbo is where Bill tells her stories from their childhood and reads to her from Moby Dick. Limbo smells of Maggie’s perfume, the only scent Scully deemed capable of erasing the smell of death from her nostrils. Limbo is so often Mulder, his hand in hers and his lips on her cheeks; limbo dwelt in his eyes of dusk all those times she felt as if her existence on this plane would end only to go on in his gaze. Limbo seems to her to have contained so much life that she cannot help but mourn the day when it will disappear into the noise of continued existence.

The door clicks open and she has the faint sense of watching her heart walk back into the room. She knows it’s Mulder, knows it because he’s her very own insomniac, but knows it instinctively because restless spirits always come when summoned. Her smile is caught on the shaft of light coming in through the door and she wonders why it’s so much easier to love him in the dark.

“I thought you’d be asleep,” Mulder says, coming to sit by her, not quite as close as he used to. Will she ever own him as completely as she did when it was too late to have him?

Her hand finds its way to wrap around his forearm. “Can’t sleep. Too much excitement, I think. What are you still doing here, Mulder? You look exhausted.” So many times over the past few days Scully had felt certain that with each touch he’d been silently giving to her every ounce of life within him, as if urging her to stay long enough to watch him fade away. She doesn’t tell her fingers to reach up and caress the purplish bags under his eyes, doesn’t tell her mouth to soften into the smile he’d stolen from her some four years ago and never given back.

“Just wanted to check in on you.” Her hand remains on his cheek as she allows Mulder to feel her warmth, allows his restive gaze to travel the extent of her, to turn her once again solid. Once satisfied, he gives her the signature Mulder grin that she’d like to write her name on someday.

“Okay?” she asks. His nod is sheepish and unapologetic.

Scully settles back into the pillow, never in her life as content as she is when she finds herself the object of that reverent fixation in his eyes of brume. She doesn’t want him to leave, but four years in she’s picked up on the rhythm of loving Mulder — he’s only hers between goodbyes.

“You should get some rest.” Her voice drags, present ringing with past echoes of a night just like this, down in the basement. Why is it so easy to love him in the dark?

Mulder’s laughter is low, rough with a brew of joy and sleep deprivation she could get drunk on. They laugh and smile at each other with the heady knowledge that to break away is impossible.

When he topples forward to rest his head on her shoulder — still laughing softly, and are those tears? — Scully welcomes his weight with open arms and a heart that feels too full to remain securely in her chest.

“You’re delirious,” she snorts against his hair, holding his head up in her hands to pepper playful kisses all across his face. His laugh is absolutely delighted now, high on the endorphin-induced thrill of lips against feverish skin. _I’m alive!_ she says without words. Every butterfly touch seems to solidify her a little bit more.

Mulder comically opens one eye, still smiling so wide she wants to press her cheek against his lips instead.

“I’m delirious…” he agrees, looking into her face for a moment. In the next, he’s dodging away from her hands and leaning down again to add in her ear “…ly happy.” Ever the grown-up, he marks his words by blowing into her ear.

She squirms and laughs — outraged, delighted, drunk on the existential cocktail of so much life and so much love. Soon he’s the one pressing giddy lips to her face, and she closes her eyes to bask in it. When his kisses turn soft, she reads Mulder’s touches like morse code: one quick peck to the tip of her nose is adoration, in two to each of her cheeks she reads sweet ownership, when his lips press into the spot marked his on her forehead she knows it to be an oath of allegiance, a pledge to save her over and over again.

His name is a sigh, a prayer, and she opens her eyes to stare into the kaleidoscopic quality of his gentle gaze, to see his head lower one final time as lips meet in greeting, in acceptance, in longing fulfilled and incomplete. In the oscillating rhythm she presses her own code into his lips as he writes his message on hers. She thinks they might be saying the same thing.

Mulder spends the night tucked against Scully on the tiny bed, breathing softly against her collarbone in hushed sleep. Her mind never wanders into slumber, pinned down on earth by the solid weight of him. When dawn first reaches its rosy fingers into the room, she watches transfixed as it touches each beloved feature with the ethereal glow of morning, paints his hair in shades of molten gold.

“Mulder,” she breathes into his hair. “It is so easy to love you in the light.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! This little dabble is dedicated to Hope, who remains my friend in spite of my crazy type-A approach to writing. You're the best! 
> 
> Let me know if you caught my little nod to "The Odyssey" in there!


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